What is BibTeX?

BibTeX is a program to create citations and bibliographies with LaTeX. It collects references out of a LaTeX document and synchronises them with data given in a separate file (file type .bib). The appearance of the citations and the bibliography are controlled by a bst file (bst means bibliography style). These files are stored in a rather complicated programming language which is not further specified. This language works as a stack machine with few commands. This means that customizations are a hard task. But fortunately there are several bibliography styles around complying to different guidelines. A selection of these can be inspected on the webpage BibTeX style examples.

For the humanities, the package biblatex is very useful. It is far more flexible than jurabib, which was the first choice over a couple of years. Jurabib's settings are quite flexible and I used it for some years; but you cannot manage everything without a knowledge in BibTeX programming. That's why I switched to biblatex.

The future BibTeX 1.0 is expected to have a lot more features than the current BibTeX 0.99—there is an interesting article by the BibTeX developer Oren Patashnik in TUGBoat 24/1, 2003: BibTeX yesterday, today, tomorrow (PDF, 6 pages).